MicroRNA signature of lymphoblasts from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis patients as potential clinical biomarkers

ALS is a fatal disease that lacks of not only effective treatments, but also presents delays in its diagnosis, since useful clinical biomarkers are unavailable. In recent years, high-throughput sequencing strategies have appeared to find new ALS biomarkers, to improve early diagnosis and to assess the efficacy of new treatments.

Since immortalized lymphocytes obtained from peripheral blood are a suitable model to study pathological features of ALS, we use these samples with the aim of characterize the miRNAs dysregulated in ALS patients. Next-generation sequencing (NGS) was utilized in order to analyse miRNAs expression profiles in immortalized lymphocytes from healthy controls, sporadic ALS (sALS) and familial ALS with mutations in superoxide dismutase 1 (SOD1-ALS).